Thursday, 23 March 2006

France bites Apple

Last week, the French lower house of parliament has passed a law that requires Apple to share I-tunes with others mp3 players so that its downloaded music can be used by all of them for the sake of giving consumers freedom of choice and of sharing online culture. The goal of the law is to open up the market of digital music by forcing big companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Sony to share their technology, and thus to enable other companies to enter the market. My guess and it is only a guess is that the real motivation behind this goal is in fact to create a French company at best or even a European that would offer the same services that Apple does. If this is the purpose of the law, I am afraid that it will not work for Apple will never share I-tunes unless it has too. I think that the French members of parliament have the mistaken that they can create French technological companies out of thin air or rather by forcing foreign companies to share their technology. The problem is that the law if it passed (the French senate still has to approve it) will be limited to France, which means that all Apple and the other have to do is to strike French from the map when it comes to I-tunes. It would have been better to provide incentives to those companies to share for I am afraid that in this era of globalization, states are going to have less and less power.